Our final day of wandering in Budapest

Today we spent our full day in Budapest.  It was a day of wandering around streets that now seem familiar, revisiting places that saw for the first time on our first night here together, and also exploring a few new places.

Our agenda was relaxed: Visit a cheese shop & studel shop that some friends had recommended; buy a few items for dinner; buy a couple of books.

We bought our dinner at the Market Hall, down a few blocks from the Parliament building. A visit to the Parliament building will be one of the unfulfilled plans of this trip. The whole area is being completely excavated & torn up by a construction project that will create an underground garage, river landing spaces & God knows what else on the site. Just passing by the building is a chore; visiting the inside was inconceivable.

The Market Hall is one of the smaller markets in the city. The previous day we had been to the much larger one by the river. Today, our food objectives were very modest: buy some greens and some pickled peppers. Pickled peppers stuffed with sauerkraut are one of our favorite culinary discoveries in this city.  The tastiest ones are slightly sweet, spicy and crunchy. The hot ones stuffed with garlic are an intense and acquired taste. 

We had hoped originally to attend performance at the Opera House. We knew by this week that this wasn’t going to happen, but until today we hadn’t even been in the structure – about which we had heard so much. Walking back from the market, we happened on the Opera House by chance. Yes, it is grand. Yes, it would be lovely to attend a concert there. But no, we did not think the guided tour in five languages was worth the time or money today.

 We did managed to visit a museum that we had not entered before today: The Hungarian Art Nouveau Museum. The museum, located by the Market Hall, is really was a private collection, a mishmash of beautiful pieces, assembled and presented with no description or added information. The lack of information in a sense gave the whole place a strange, almost impromptu feeling, as if we were wandering through someone’s very fine furniture warehouse. Every once & awhile, we saw a piece or two that had a price put on it – but the most part, the pieces were just placed very closely together, mute witnesses to a time of vanished bourgeois elegance in Hungary.

In the evening, after a simple dinner at home, we headed out yet again for final stroll around this city we have come to love. The evening air was comfortably warm and the streets were filled with other strollers. We visited one of our favorite pieces of public art – a statue of Franz Lizt nearby our hostel residence. The statue throbs with energy, Lizt’s powerful figure pounding an invisible piano. The statue of Lizt is located near the Franz Lizt Academy of Music, founded by the pianist and composer.

We continued strolling all the way to the river, crossing the Chain Bridge to the Buda side of the city. This bridge is recognized as one of the most beautiful bridges in the world. It was built by Count Istavan Szechenyi, reportedly after he missed his father’s funeral because of the city’s lack of a bridge. The bridge, completed in 1849, links the Pest & Buda sections of the city, one of the count’s pet causes. Like all the city’s bridges, it was destroyed by the Nazis at the end of World War II, but it was also quickly reconstructed, and today it is one of the city’s most notable landmarks.